Meditation   from  A.E. Houseman

Ale Man! Ale the stuff to drink

For fellows whom it hurts to think!

Look into the pewter Pot

To see the world as the world is Not!

Moping melancholy Mad…

Come,  a tune to dance to lads

But if its dancing you would be

There're brisker pipes than poetry

And Malt does more than Milton can

To justify God's ways to man…

 

 

What brings you Joy?   It is a question Pat Winters posed to our discussion Group last week.   What brings you Joy? 

 

Knowing how a rainbow is made or why the sky or a blue Jay is blue or how a rocket works or how a butterfly or bumblebee flies doesn't make them less lovely…and in some ways it makes them more miraculous. 

 

As a self-certified curmudgeon who learned at least part of his attitude from Tom Rider…I must tell you that I like bits of information that contradict conventional wisdom.   It makes me feel smart and superior and I like that…even though I "affirm and propmote" that everybody has inherent worth and dignity.   The way you find such tid-bits of information often requires one to indulge in the practice of ANALYSIS.   (that is another word for "thinking".)

 

It is generally accepted that left brain is the home to mathematical and logical thought, and language.   The right brain is thought to be the home of compassion, creativity, artistic appreciation, music and intuition and humor.   While this is simplistic, it is, on the whole, a reasonably correct view.   The two halves of the brain communicate over a large bundle of nerves called the Corpus Collosum.    Nevertheless left brain has immense capacity enjoy and create things and the right brain has interestingly obtuse AND ACCUTE reasoning skills.    

 

The record of human beings in history who depend on intuition  and gut-feel has not been particularly successful -- while the historical accomplishments of the left brain strengths of logic, reason, communication and mathematics is stunning …. both its magnitude and importance to the human condition.    Nevertheless,   the incredible accomplishments of the left brain in human history…oddly enough, require the right brain's approval and evaluation…and perhaps, polishing and augmentation.   Our skills at communication are valueless unless we have something important to communicate.   Medicine without caring and understanding is cold comfort.  So analysis needs the right brain to appreciate it.   But the right brain needs the left brain to keep it from doing stupid things.

 

Religion avoids the left brain like a plague.   And with good reason.    Religion is logically silly...but it has some rationale because it is linked to community which has left-brain appeal.  

 

But today I want to talk about having fun with your left brain which really means letting your right brain ask your left brain fun questions…   You see the left brain is not particularly good about asking questions.   It is very good at figuring out answers though and spotting lies and absurdities.   Analysis is one of its best tools.   If asked what ‘analysis’ means, most people today immediately think of breaking something down into its components and then thinking about those parts.

 

Intellectually I think that the UU seven principles is one of the best statements of philosophical and human ethical principles  ever constructed.   But even there we can have some fun.  In fact, analyzing religious or philosophical statements is great fun.

 

1.  We affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person.    Hmmmm.  I think I know what this means but my view of the consequences of this principle might vary from others.   Perhaps one might discuss whether the term "inherent worth" for example be subject to situational factors….i.e. does a serial killer have the same inherent worth as a cancer researcher, or a surgeon?.   Why is our dignity Inherent?   What is Dignity anyway?

 

2.  We affirm and promote justice, equity and compassion in human relations …    One might be justified in asking "as opposed to what?"  All three of these things are very right brain fuzzy concepts.

 

3.  We affirm and promote  Acceptance of one another and encouragement to spiritual growth in our congregations.    OK acceptance is cool….but nobody I know  knows what the hell spiritual growth is.  This is one of those terms where the left brain says What is this?  And the right brain says…don't you mind left brain this is one of my things so don't worry your little brains cells about it. 

 

4.  We affirm and promote   A free and responsible search for truth and meaning.    Now this is something for our Left Brains to latch on to.   My observation, however is that this is a principle that is geographical.  The further East you go the less likely you will find UUs interested in this particular principle.   As you west…the search gets wilder and wilder until you run into the wiccans.   My analytical guess is that the free and responsible search for truth and meaning is a Midwestern Conspiracy.

 

5.  We affirm and promote   The right of conscience and the use of the democratic process within our congregations and in society at large.   My left brain and right brain have gotten together and says, we talk the talk but do not walk the walk.   We are confronted by one of the most anti-democratic and anti-right of conscience forces in the world…the religion of Islam and the UUA is silent.    

 

6.  We affirm and promote   The goal of world community with peace, liberty and justice for all.   The most powerful and effective force against peace, liberty and justice in the world today is --- I will let you answer that question.  Again, our UUA neither affirms nor promotes this particular principle  very effectively

 

7.  We affirm and promote   Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part. 

And here both left and right brains must pay homage and say "so it is written…so may it be."   

 

But this presentation is not about Religion.   It is about how much fun the the right brain can have by using the left brain creatively….and vice versa.  

 

As Joel Severinghouse can tell you about training to fly on instruments,  your intuition…your gut feelings about the world are quite often wrong.    That is not to say that the rational scientific approach to things always  gives one the right answer…but science never says "have faith in my conclusions".   It merely says here's the data and here is how I arrived at my conclusions.  If I am wrong either my method was wrong or my data was incorrect… you are welcome to check it out.   When a large number of people do similar experiments and come to the same conclusions, I tend to have a good deal of confidence in them.

 

If you are flying ….say from New York to Martha's Vinyard on a Foggy day and you are on instruments because visibility is crap…. Your physical intuition may not be your friend.   Our experience in this life is overwhelmingly of the nature,  enjoy your right brain but trust your left brain.   Unless of course, you are a Jedi knight trained by a puppet.

 

Pierre de Fermat died in 1665. Today we think of Fermat as a number theorist, in fact as perhaps the most famous number theorist who ever lived. It is therefore surprising to find that Fermat was in fact a lawyer and only an amateur mathematician. 

Fermat's Last Theorem states that

xⁿ + yⁿ = zⁿ

has no non-zero integer solutions for x, y and z when n > 2. Fermat wrote

I have discovered a truly remarkable proof which this margin is too small to contain. 

 

Three hundred and fifty years later we still are falling for that gag.

 

There is a branch of mathematics and analysis called "operations research" which is a wonderful intellectual advance from World War two.   If you watch Numbers …much of what you see on that show is OR in nature.  A lot of what I will relate today comes from the Operations Research mindset because it is a way of approaching problems.   

 

Once upon a time there was a very large  sky-scraper built in 1970 -- lets call it the John Hancock  Building.   It has 100 floors  It takes 94 seconds to go from the bottom in its special express elevator to the observation level on the 94^th floor.  The number of elevators was carefully calculated.  A team of mathematicians was brought in and the computers controlling the elevators were programmed to minimize wait times.   Elevators were pre-staged to specific floors depending on the time of day and traffic to optimize wait time.   Average wait time was considered to be very good for a modern building this size.  Despite the most sophisticated computer scheduling, however, people kept complaining that the wait for elevators was too long.   

          Analysis:  How to shorten the average wait time?   Adding more elevators was not a viable option.   It was about as good as it could get.

All the smartest engineers were stumped.               How to shorten the perceived wait time?  Answer:   Install mirrors beside the elevator doors.  

          People checked their hair and clothes and whatever…and complaints totally disappeared. 

 

Once upon a time I was watching  the large Sunday summer demonstration or celebration on a very hot day on the Washington DC  National Mall.    I do not recall the reason for the gathering but the TV news guys seem to be fascinated by the long lines at the porta-poties brought in for the occasion and the obvious fact that there was a shortage of such facilities.   Wait times were beginning to exceed 15-30 minutes.   I was watching this event with my Father-in-Law who was a noted Operations Researcher and a brilliant guy on many fronts.   We started talking about the number of people cooling off in the reflecting pool,   It appeared to be pretty solid people from edge to edge the entire length of the pool. 

 

Given the interest in the porta-poty shortage,   the heat of the day,  the mass of people in the reflecting pool and our enjoyment of mathematics …and the fact that we ourselves had consumed a reasonable number of alcoholic beverages with its consequences…(my father-in-law was quite competitive and would wait till I excused myself before he would admit to Natures requirements)…our thoughts naturally turned to the general issue of reflecting pool volume and the beer-induced contribution therein by the throngs of beer-drinking celebrants.    Clearly a problem susceptible to logical and mathematical analysis if one knows a few facts.   We squinted at the TV and determined that there were approximately 1 person per square meter in the reflecting pool.   We averaged out adults and children. 

 

Although we did not have google back then, we did have the encyclopedia.  It turns out that the reflecting pool is 618 meters long and 51 meters wide…. Or 31,500 or so people in the pool.   It is 30 inches deep in the middle and holds about 25.5 million liters of 6.7 million gallons of water.   It seemed reasonable to assume that there would, in any hour long period a turnover of 3 times the population or approximately 90,000 people of which we postulated that 30 percent would wait in line for the official porta-poty experience, twenty percent would find a convenient tree or bush or simply not need to go because of the heat dehydration and fifty percent would find their dip in the reflecting pool more relief than refreshing. 

 

This gives us a number of about 45,000 contributing people per hour .   The average beer induced production of an adult human as I recall is about 40 cc's  but it was very hot so we calculated about 20 ccs.  This would calculate out to 900,000 cc or about 900 liters.   900 liters in 25.5 million is not much.   One fiftieth of a centimeter in a pool the size of the reflecting pool.   Given the circulation of the system and evaporation rates we determined that the human contribution to the overall was miniscule compared to the amount of water that the park-service system automatically added to the pool to deal with evaporation on a hot day.  (about 45,000 liters/ hour)   Calculating evaporation was interesting because we had to estimate humidity (85%) and temperature (95 degrees in Washington at 2 oclock in the afternoon) plus the amount of water in soaked clothes as folks exited the pool and entered.

 

I recount this story because it is a memory I treasure of the many delightful times I had with my father-in-law where we analyzed things and I learned how much fun it was to analyze things….and how much fun it was when some reasonable statement made by some font of wisdom…turned out to be totally bogus after simple analysis.   How much fun it was to learn some out-of-the-way fact on the way to an analytical conclusion.

 

Many years ago I first saw 2001 a space odyssey.   I saw it with an aeronautical engineer friend of mine named Pete Fields who has been, for the last 30 years on a small team maintained by the US NAVY dedicated to keeping our technical knowledge about torpedoes current and maintained.   Our fun was trying to see if the Movie made any engineering or physics mistakes.  It was amazing.  The dust from descending rocket sleds were blown in proper parabolic lines.  (a common mistake in space movies is to have billowing dust that only occurs in air.)  We only found one mistake….  The soles of the stewardess slippers in one of the scenes deformed  under the influence of a gravity in what was a no-gravity situation.   It was fun.

 

Did you know that Gene Roddenberry wanted the Starship Enterprise to move silently through space…no sound in space as you all know.  Network executives  insisted that there be what is now a familiar rumble and swoosh.  Later he sneakily deleted the rumble but the swoosh remained. 

 

Many movies and TV series had aliens after Earth's water…which we have a lot of and seem to be determined to pollute.   Evidently many of these writers thought that the Universe was dry and it was a cosmic blessing that Earth had so much water.   Just a bit of thought and some reading will reveal that the Universe has lots of water.  The Oort cloud at the outer edge of the Solar system has enough water to drown the entire Earth.    I will not even mention the outrageous desire many hideous aliens seem to have for Earth's Northern European Virgins.

 

Analysis is a recent philosophical reaction of common sense and appreciation of the real world from the ideas of the brilliant but muddled German philosopher Hegel who was, in turn reacting to Aristotle, Kant and Hume.  Who was reacting to Plato.  Hegel liked logic but seemed enamored of absolutes that comforted the religious folks.  Russel and Whitehead and Kirkegaard attacked the philosophical absolutes  and were subsequently proven correct in the physical world by Hiesenberg Physics.  Hegel's world of religious philosophy and absolutes had been thin and logical…but the new analytical world was richly human and deep and solid and multi-dimensional   Analysis was the great partnership of Philosophy, Science and Mathematics in the 20^th century.   It was fun to be smart.  It was rather unfriendly to silliness.

 

Analysis gives us some interesting guidelines on how to think.    Occams Razor is a general rule that says it is best to use the simplest explanation consistent with the information we have.  Why?  Because it works.

 

Analysis told us to define our terms.   Language is important.

 

The law of the excluded middle is a rule of logic (and mathmatics) that says the a meaningful statement cannot be true and not true at the same time.   Why?   Because that is the way the Universe is.

 

Godel in the 1930s showed that any mathematical system sufficiently powerful enough to be useful has inevitable paradoxes built into it.   In what we call our normal numbering system…that paradox is embodied in the term "the square root of minus 1"  which is extremely useful and nobody knows what it means.   One of the things it means is that there is no absolute truth outside of tautologies. 

 

Bertrand Russel showed us a very important tool of thinking called the "Theory of Logical Types"  If you don't know what that is, it means that you are trying to construct your mental house without a hammer or  nails.   I will explain it to anyone who wants an explanation of why it is not intolerant to be intolerant of intolerance.    It is taught in advanced business schools and corporations and intelligence Universities.  It should be taught in UU Sunday school.

 

And finally we come to a very interesting real-world analytical issue.   The problem of altruism…and its effects.

Survival of the fittest seems to indicate that we should do anything to survive to procreate.   The odd reality turns out that altruistic behavior often has the best survival rationale and biology often takes advantage of this fact of nature.   In sports,  teamwork beats the superstars every time.

 

  There has been, in human affairs, a general problem often referred to as the Prisoner's Dilemma.   Essentially it goes like this,  

1.    There are two conspirators accused of a crime.

2.    they are separated and each is told that if they rat on the other, and the other does not rat on them, they will go free and the other will get a stiff sentence.

3.    If neither rats on the other, they both will get light sentences.

4.    If both rat on each other they will get heavier sentences.  

 

It turns out that life is chock full of situations that resemble the Prisoner's Dilemma    There is no right answer, by   the way.   It rather depends on how much you trust your partner.   The highest payoff lowest risk behavior is to rat on your friend.

 

Let us restate the problem in economic terms.  You make a deal with someone that involves an exchange of goods…say a sack of food for a sack of money.  You arrange  to meet and exchange sacks, never to see each other again.

 

Again there is no right answer within the problem.  However if you are sure that no one will ever know…it is best to cheat.   If you know that this is a one time situation it best to cheat.    Cooperation vs non-cooperation where you are anonymous and will never see the person again provides a simple choice.   Of course, if the other person thinks like you…neither one of you benefits.   If the other person is honorable, you get the benefit at no cost.   If you are honorable and the other person is not, you get the sucker's reward.

 

In the real world, we are often confronted with situations where there is risk.   The avoidance of cooperation minimizes risk but also minimizes or eliminates any possible benefits.   In the real world, we also run into the same players again and again.  What is the influence of reputation?   What is the influence of history?   There is a science to these things called game theory.   A product of analysis and mathematics.  These are non-zero sum games

 

Suppose you are in a room with a 500 other people.   You must interact with 100 people per hour randomly in the prisoners dilemma type game.    If you co-operate and the other person defects…you get zip and he gets 5 points.

If you Co=operate and the other person co-operates - you both get 3 points

If you defect and the other person defects, you both get 1 point  

 

The most you can get be co-operating is 3 points  You risk getting zip

If you defect you can get 5 points and the worst you can get is one point.

It would appear that your best strategy is to defect all the time.  You will always get at least one point.

 

Many of you know where this is going.   It has been proven again and again through mathematics and computer simulations over many many years that the winning strategy is called Tit-for-tat.    It is a mirror strategy that requires the player to always cooperate on the first exchange…and then mirror what the player did to you the next time you encounter him or her.  It also requires the player to break a tit-for-tat exchange where it becomes obvious that the other player is using the same strategy…so that one player takes a risk to cooperate when the other is predicted to cooperate…thereby setting off a chain of cooperative exchanges.

 

This game also is predicated on the fact that no player knows when it will end so that the player can get advantage just before the game ends.   In other words, any timetable ruins the game and increases risk.   It might interest you to know that there are many international contests held each year to determine better strategies.   None have ever been found in the long term.

 

We played Tit-for-tat with the Russians for years during the cold war.   The Russians were very good at it, by the way and knew what we were doing.  Many people often marveled at how friendly the US and the Russians were in the era of Mutually Assured Destruction.  The answer that most Americans did not know is that we were playing Tit-for-Tat.  The Israelis and the Palestinians both play the game and know exactly what they are doing.   Israelis play to win and the Palestinians play to win most of the time except they often screw up to gain the world's sympathy.  A tactic that doesn't work for those that understand the game.  It is difficult to figure out why the Palestinians continually do things against their own self interest.

 

We play Tit-for-tat in the world both diplomatically and militarily.   

 

This tit-for-tat story has a rather interesting analytical twist.  The Christian ethic of "turning the other cheek" is demonstratably mathematically incorrect except as an approach to a first time exchange.    If it is mathematically and scientifically incorrect, then Jesus was wrong…and the idea that he is the divine son of God,   an already silly idea on its face, is shown to be erroneous.   Unless you think that God made the Avacado Pit too big and therefore can make mistakes too.    It seems that if one is a Christian, one must accept the idea that God has endorsed a losing strategy or that Jesus was fallible and therefore not divine.  Actually it is worse than this.   Turning the other cheek is destabilizing of general social norms which is why it is not really practiced by anybody.   That this is a destructive idea is a logical and scientifically impeccable conclusion.  

 

Of course, if you have faith that Jesus is divine or that the moon is made of green cheese, no amount of mathmatics, logic or evidence will change your mind.

 

However,  Religious faith is not the only culprit in the well documented reluctance of people to recognize real world data and conform their opinions and world view to it.  The problem is that even if you do not have faith, it is difficult to change your mind once it has decided what it wants to think.    We see the world through filters of our experience and opinion.   A little analysis should convince you that there is a lot of benefit to this fact and a lot of danger also.   It is difficult to change your world view.   The best opinion is worth less than one little fact.   Of course Saddam has Poison Gas and Nuclear…ooops I mean NuCUlar bombs.

 

If you think that science and religion can co-exist peacefully…my response is, sure…as long as religion is willing to change.   I believe that religion world-wide is changing and is in the process of changing.  It is painful and bloody change but it is necessary.   I also believe that Unitarian-Universalism, like many moderate religious voices of tolerance in the West actually impedes and delays change and encourages extremists in their extremism by its rather inexplicable refusal to confront and oppose that which causes so much pain and suffering in the world.   A point that Sam Harris makes in his book, THE END OF FAITH.

 

That is why I come to this place.   We do not necessarily agree with each other here…and I for one wouldn't come if we did.   I like the challenge of looking at or trying to look at the world as it really is,  and I seek out those who think a bit differently…and I am not be afraid to analyze what we really say and  not be afraid to come to conclusions.   It may come as a surprise to some of you, but I am wrong sometimes.     It is often easy to be wrong…and we need to continually test our observations and conclusion against those of other smart people and not be afraid to change our view.

 

Remember the immortal words of Joe Petronov who was walking in the wood with his friend one hundred miles north of Moscow when they came across bear tracks. Bears in those parts were known to attack hikers.  Joe immediately sat down and took out his running shoes from his pack and started putting them on.   His friend looked at him as if he'd gone crazy.   "Joe, you can't outrun a bear."  He said.   Joe smiled and said  "My analysis is that I don't have to outrun the bear….I just have to outrun you.)  

 

Here is some basic information about the world set to a vaguely familiar tune.    

<Music> by Tom Lehrer  "The Elements"